Monty Python Scripts

Housing Project Built by Characters from Nineteenth-century English Literature

The cast:

VOICE OVER

Michael Palin

HUNTINGDON

Eric Idle

The sketch:

(Cut to a building site. The camera pans over it.)

Voice Over: This new housing development in Bristol is one
of the most interesting in the country. It's using a variety of new
techniques: shock-proof curtain-walling, a central high voltage,
self-generated electricity source, and extruded acrylic fiberglass
fitments. It's also the first major housing project in Britain to be
built entirely by characters from nineteenth-century English
literature.

(By, this time the pan has come to rest on a section of the
site where various nineteenth-century literary figures are at work
round a cement mixer: two ladies in crinolines, Bob Cratchett on his
father's back, Heathcliff and Catherine throwing bricks to each
other with smoldering passion. Nelson. Mr. Beadle as fireman. Cut to
the interior of a half-finished concrete shell. A little girl is
working on top of a ladder.)

Voice Over: Here Little Nell, from Dickens's 'Old
Curiosity Shop' fits new nylon syphons into the asbestos-lined
ceilings ... (shot of complicated electrical wiring in some
impressive electrical installation) But its the electrical
system which has attracted the most attention. (cut to Arthur
Huntingdon studying a plan; he has a builder's safety helmet on)
Arthur Huntingdon, who Helen Graham married as a young girl, and
whose shameless conduct eventually drove her back to her brother
Lawrence, in Anne Bronte's 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall' describes
why it's unique.

Huntingdon: Because sir, it is self-generating. Because we
have harnessed here in this box the very forces of life itself. The
very forces that will send Helen running back to beg forgiveness!

(Cut to a close up of big pre-fabricated concrete slabs being
hoisted into the air by a crane and start to pull out, as the
commentator speaks, to reveal a crowd of nineteenth-century
farmhands working on them.)

Voice Over: The on-site building techniques involve the
construction of twelve-foot walling blocks by a crowd of farmhands
from 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles' supervised by the genial landlady,
Mrs. Jupp, from Samuel Butler's 'Way of All Flesh'.

(Pan to reveal Mrs. Jupp with a clipboard. Cut to voice over
narrator in vision with a stick-mike, in front of an impressive
piece of motorway interchange building. Behind him and working on
the site are six angels, three devils, and Adam and Eve.)